“Captain isn’t going to leave home, Tim,” I cried.  “You mustn’t expect him to take so active a part in your demonstrations of joy.”

“It wasn’t the delight of leaving home made me dance,” returned the boy.  “It was the contemplation of the time we’ll have when we get together again.”

“Then why go away at all?”

“There you are.  A minute ago you agreed with me; you were right with me in my plan to do something in this world.  Now you are using your cunning arguments to dissuade me.  But you can’t stop me, Mark.  I’ve accepted the place.  Mr. Weston has sent word that I am coming, and there you are.  I must keep to my bargain.”

“When did Weston arrange all this for you?”

“This morning.  We were on Blue Gum Ridge hunting squirrels, and we got to talking over one thing and another.  I guess I kind of opened up—­for he’s a clever man, Mark.  Why, he pumped me dry.  We hadn’t sat there on a log very long till he knew the whole family history and about everything I had ever learned or thought of.  He asked me if I intended to spend all my life here, and I said it looked that way, and then I told him how I wanted to go and do something and be somebody.”

[Illustration:  “He pumped me dry.”]

Tim stopped suddenly, and winked at Captain.  “I told him I wanted to go away and see something as you had done, for I was weary of listening to your accounts of things you’d seen.  It’s awful to have to listen to another’s travels.  It must be fine to tell about your own.”

“Well, is it my talking that’s driving you away, or is it Weston’s alluring offers?”

“Alluring?” Tim laughed.  “I’ll say for Weston, he is frank.  He told me that to his mind business was worse than death.  He was born to it.  His father left it to him and he has to keep it going to live; but he lets his partner look after it mostly, and he is always worrying lest his partner should die and leave him with the whole thing on his hands.  He told me I’d have to drudge in a dark office over books for ten hours a day, and that it would be years before I began to see any rewards.  By that time I would probably decide that the old-fashioned scheme of having kings born to order was more sensible than making men wear their lives out trying to become rulers.  A cow was contented, he said, because it was satisfied to stand under a tree and breathe the free air, and look up into the blue skies and over the green fields, and chew the cud.  As long as the cow was satisfied with one cud it would be contented; but once the idea got abroad in the pasture that two cuds were required for a respectable cow, peace and happiness were gone forever.”

“Our lanky stranger seems a wise man,” said I.  “In the face of all that, what did you say?”

“I told him I wasn’t a cow,” Tim answered.

There was no controverting such a reply, and though my sympathies were with the pessimistic Weston, I dared not raise my voice in defence of his logic as against this young brother.  Tim seemed to think that the fact that he was not a cow turned from him all the force of Weston’s philosophy, and insisted on going blindly on in search of another cud.